It's one of the great historic puzzles: How was it that poor Southern whites, who had the most to lose by seceding from the Union and declaring war against the North, came to agree to do such a thing?

The question survives today: How is that the white Southern working class, which has been rendered economically bereft by its deep embrace of conservatism, its rejection of unionism, and the cultural backwardness of which its citizens are aggressively proud, can continue to support a politics that makes their lives miserable?

Lyndon Baines Johnson knew the answer to that, according to Bill Moyers, who recalls that LBJ told him, in 1960: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best
colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him
somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

Indeed, the pattern for this was established at the very genesis of the Confederacy, when Southern society remained highly stratified -- an elite "1 percent" society of plantation owners and slaveholders, a large white working underclass, and the black slave class, all walled off from the other. The Confederacy was the brainchild of the elite plantation/slave owners, who were determined to maintain their privileged status quo; but its monstrous offspring, the Civil War, would be fed by the bodies and lives of millions of working-class Southerners who received only a handful of direct benefits from the institution of slavery, few of them economic.

The critical question that gave the Confederacy its limited legitimacy was the extent to which the latter were willing to lay down their lives for the former. And how was that made possible?

Jonna Ivin at the journal Stir expounded on this at length recently, while pondering the nature of Donald Trump voters:

As slavery expanded in the South and indentured servitude declined,
the wealthy elite offered poor whites the earliest version of the
American Dream: if they worked hard enough, they could achieve
prosperity, success, and upward social mobility — if not for themselves,
then perhaps for future generations.

But few realized that dream. In “The Whiting of Euro-Americans: A Divide and Conquer Strategy,” the Rev. Dr. Thandeka notes:

Not
surprisingly, however, poor whites never became the economic equals of
the elite. Though both groups’ economic status rose, the gap between the
wealthy and poor widened as a result of slave productivity. Thus, poor
whites’ belief that they now shared status and dignity with their social
betters was largely illusory.

With whites and Blacks divided, the wealthy elite prospered
enormously for the next two hundred years while poor whites remained
locked in poverty. With the potential election of Abraham Lincoln,
however, the upper class began to worry they would lose their most
valuable commodity: slave labor. The numbers were not on their
side — not the financial numbers, but the number of bodies it would take
to wage war should Lincoln try to abolish slavery. And it was white
male bodies they needed. (Poor women were of little value to the rich,
since they couldn’t vote or fight in a war.) So how did wealthy
plantation owners convince poor white males to fight for a “peculiar
institution” that did not benefit them?

The answer, as Ivin explains, is actually fairly simple: "Religious and political leaders began using a combination of fear, sex,
and God to paint a chilling picture of freed angry Black men ravaging
the South."

As Southerners became increasingly isolated, they reacted by becoming
more strident in defending slavery. The institution was not just a
necessary evil: it was a positive good, a practical and moral
necessity. Controlling the slave population was a matter of concern for
all Whites, whether they owned slaves or not. Curfews governed the
movement of slaves at night, and vigilante committees patrolled the
roads, dispensing summary justice to wayward slaves and whites suspected
of harboring abolitionist views. Laws were passed against the
dissemination of abolitionist literature, and the South increasingly
resembled a police state. A prominent Charleston lawyer described the
city’s citizens as living under a “reign of terror.”

The primary, and perhaps most important, of the institutions in which working-class whites were propagandized into supporting the cause of the slaveholders was in the churches, where preachers constantly extolled the virtues of slavery and the dangers of a society without it:

Rev. Richard Furman

Reverend Richard Furman of South Carolina insisted that the right to hold
slaves was clearly sanctioned by the Holy Scriptures. He emphasized a
practical side as well, warning that if Lincoln were elected, “every
Negro in South Carolina and every other Southern state will be his own
master; nay, more than that, will be the equal of every one of you. If
you are tame enough to submit, abolition preachers will be at hand to
consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands.”

A fellow reverend from Virginia agreed that on no other subject “are
[the Bible’s] instructions more explicit, or their salutary tendency and
influence more thoroughly tested and corroborated by experience than on
the subject of slavery.” The Methodist Episcopal Church, South,
asserted that slavery “has received the sanction of Jehova.” As a South
Carolina Presbyterian concluded: “If the scriptures do not justify
slavery, I know not what they do justify.”

The Biblical argument started with Noah’s curse on Ham, the father of
Canaan, which was used to demonstrate that God had ordained slavery and
had expressly applied it to Blacks. Commonly cited were passages in
Leviticus that authorized the buying, selling, holding and bequeathing
of slaves as property. Methodist Samuel Dunwody from South Carolina
documented that Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, and Job owned slaves, arguing
that “some of the most eminent of the Old Testament saints were slave
holders.” The Methodist Quarterly Review noted further that “the
teachings of the new testament in regard to bodily servitude accord with
the old.” While slavery was not expressly sanctioned in the New
Testament, Southern clergymen argued that the absence of condemnation
signified approval. They cited Paul’s return of a runaway slave to his
master as Biblical authority for the Fugitive Slave Act, which required
the return of runaway slaves.

... During the 1850’s, pro-slavery arguments from the pulpit became
especially strident. A preacher in Richmond exalted slavery as “the
most blessed and beautiful form of social government known; the only one
that solves the problem, how rich and poor may dwell together; a
beneficent patriarchate.” The Central Presbyterian affirmed that
slavery was “a relation essential to the existence of civilized
society.” By 1860, Southern preachers felt comfortable advising their
parishioners that “both Christianity and Slavery are from heaven; both
are blessings to humanity; both are to be perpetuated to the end of
time.”

Of course, Southern politicians got into the act, making defense of slavery both a patriotic and a cultural value:

William Harris, Mississippi’s commissioner to Georgia, explained that
Lincoln’s election had made the North more defiant than ever. “They
have demanded, and now demand equality between the white and negro
races, under our constitution; equality in representation, equality in
right of suffrage, equality in the honors and emoluments of office,
equality in the social circle, equality in the rights of matrimony,” he
cautioned, adding that the new administration wanted “freedom to the
slave, but eternal degradation for you and me.”

As Harris saw things, “Our fathers made this a government for the
white man, rejecting the negro as an ignorant, inferior, barbarian race,
incapable of self-government, and not, therefore, entitled to be
associated with the white man upon terms of civil, political, or social
equality.” Lincoln and his followers, he stated, aimed to “overturn and
strike down this great feature of our union and to substitute in its
stead their new theory of the universal equality of the black and white
races.” For Harris, the choice was clear. Mississippi would “rather
see the last of her race, men, women, and children, immolated in one
common funeral pyre than see them subjugated to the degradation of
civil, political and social equality with the negro race.” The Georgia
legislature ordered the printing of a thousand copies of his speech.

Typical of the commissioner letters is that written by Stephen Hale,
an Alabama commissioner, to the Governor of Kentucky, in December 1860.
Lincoln’s election, he observed, was “nothing less than an open
declaration of war, for the triumph of this new theory of government
destroys the property of the south, lays waste her fields, and
inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection,
consigning her citizens to assassinations and her wives and daughters to
pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized
Africans. The slave holder and non-slaveholder must ultimately share
the same fate; all be degraded to a position of equality with free
negroes, stand side by side with them at the polls, and fraternize in
all the social relations of life, or else there will be an eternal war
of races, desolating the land with blood, and utterly wasting all the
resources of the country.”

The black rape scene from 'The Birth of a Nation'

What Southerner, Hale asked, “can without indignation and horror
contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and
daughters in the not distant future associating with free negroes upon
terms of political and social equality?” Abolition would surely mean
that “the two races would be continually pressing together,” and
“amalgamation or the extermination of the one or the other would be
inevitable.” Secession, argued Hale, was the only means by which the
“heaven ordained superiority of the white over the black race” could be
sustained. The abolition of slavery would either plunge the South into a
race war or so stain the blood of the white race that it would be
contaminated for all time.” Could southern men “submit to such
degradation and ruin,” he asked, and responded to his own question, “God
forbid that they should.”

Henry Benning

Typical also was the message from Henry Benning of Georgia – later
one of General Lee’s most talented brigade commanders – to the Virginia
legislature. “If things are allowed to go on as they are, it is certain
that slavery is to be abolished,” he predicted. “By the time the north
shall have attained the power, the black race will be in a large
majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures,
black juries, black everything. Is it to be supposed that the white
race will stand for that? It is not a supposable case.”

What did Benning predict would happen? “War will break out
everywhere like hidden fire from the earth. We will be overpowered and
our men will be compelled to wander like vagabonds all over the earth,
and as for our women, the horrors of their state we cannot contemplate
in imagination. We will be completely exterminated,” he announced, “and
the land will be left in the possession of the blacks, and then it will
go back to a wilderness and become another Africa or Saint Domingo.”

Finally, of course, community leaders fell into line in promoting this line of thought:

More to the point, he noted, abolition meant “the turning loose upon
society, without the salutary restraints to which they are now
accustomed, more than four millions of a very poor and ignorant
population, to ramble in idleness over the country until their wants
should drive most of them, first to petty thefts, and afterwards to the
bolder crimes of robbery and murder.” The planter and his family would
“not only to be reduced to poverty and want, by the robbery of his
property, but to complete the refinement of the indignity, they are to
be degraded to the level of an inferior race, be jostled by them in
their paths, and intruded upon, and insulted over by rude and vulgar
upstarts. Who can describe the loathsomeness of such an intercourse;—the
constrained intercourse between refinement reduced to poverty, and
swaggering vulgarity suddenly elevated to a position which it is not
prepared for?”

Non-slaveholders, he predicted, were also in danger. “It will be to
the non-slaveholder, equally with the largest slaveholder, the
obliteration of caste and the deprivation of important privileges,” he
cautioned. “The color of the white man is now, in the South, a title of
nobility in his relations as to the negro,” he reminded his readers.
“In the Southern slaveholding States, where menial and degrading offices
are turned over to be per formed exclusively by the Negro slave, the
status and color of the black race becomes the badge of inferiority, and
the poorest non-slaveholder may rejoice with the richest of his
brethren of the white race, in the distinction of his color. He may be
poor, it is true; but there is no point upon which he is so justly proud
and sensitive as his privilege of caste; and there is nothing which he
would resent with more fierce indignation than the attempt of the
Abolitionist to emancipate the slaves and elevate the Negroes to an
equality with himself and his family.”

Wealthy plantation owners had succeeded in separating the two races,
and they now planted a fear of Blacks in the minds of poor and working
white men. Enslaved Blacks were an asset to the wealthy, but freed
Blacks were portrayed as a danger to all. By creating this common enemy
among rich and poor alike, the wealthy elite sent a clear message: fight
with us against abolitionists and you will remain safe.

It worked. Poor and working class whites signed up by the hundreds of
thousands to fight for what they believed was their way of life.
Meanwhile, many of the wealthy planters who benefitted economically from
slavery were granted exemptions from military service and avoided the
horrors of battle. On both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, wealthy elites
were allowed to pay other men to take their place on the bloody
battlefields. As the war lingered on, poor whites in the North and South
began to realize the rich had waged the war, but it was the poor who
were dying in it.

... With more than 650,000 deaths, the end of the Civil War eventually
brought freedom for African-Americans. But after the war, ex-slaves were
left to linger and die in a world created by those in the North who no
longer cared and those in the South who now resented their existence.
Poor whites didn’t fare much better. Without land, property, or hope for
economic gains, many freed Blacks and returning white soldiers turned
to sharecropping and found themselves once again working side by side,
dependent on wealthy landowners.

Ivin also makes clear that this has profound relevance today, because these same poor whites are the meat of Donald Trump's proto-fascist army:

Trump supporters believe he’s different. They believe that he cares
about us, that he tells it like it is, that he gives us a voice, that he
can’t be bought because he’s already rich, that he’s railing against
politics as usual.

But does Trump care about the white underclass, or does he still think poor people are “morons”?

Did slave owners care about white indentured servants when they
pitted them against African slaves, or did they want to ensure a steady
supply of cheap labor? Did Ronald Reagan care about poor white people
when he trotted out the fictional welfare queen, or did he need a budget
item to cut? Do wealthy elites and politicians care about poor and
middle class people when they send them off to war, or are they
anticipating massive profits?

Trump is railing against establishment politics not because he cares
about the white underclass, but because he needs us — for now. He isn’t
reaching out a hand to lift us up. He wants to stand on our shoulders so
we can lift him up.

Sara Robinson has worked as an editor or columnist for several national magazines, on beats as varied as sports, travel, and the Olympics; and has contributed to over 80 computer games for EA, Lucasfilm, Disney, and many other companies. A native of California's High Sierra, she spent 20 years in Silicon Valley before moving to Vancouver, BC in 2004. She currently is pursuing an MS in Futures Studies at the University of Houston. You can reach her at srobinson@enginesofmischief.com.